Transforming the city: where to start?

Why don’t we grow plants on the sides of skyscrapers? And why isn’t all this rainwater run-off used to irrigate them? Our modern urban environments spark countless ideas for innovation toward sustainability. But who’s really going to make them happen?

Actually - according to two organisations currently co-exhibiting and experimenting in Berlin - you are. The BMW Guggenheim Lab and FutureCityLab projects were both created in the belief that citizen collaboration is key to improving cities and their inhabitants’ quality of life.

On 15th June, the Guggenheim Lab launched stage two of its "urban think tank" designed to achieve that goal. The temporary structure is making a six-year global tour, after its debut in New York last year. Now in Berlin’s Pfefferberg complex, the lab is hosting workshops aiming to tackle both local and global problems, and will work to start regional projects that will carry on long after the project packs up.

While the Guggenheim Lab is designed to pop up in cities to foster face-to-face collaboration, FutureCityLab is an initiative created to take advantage of new collaborative technologies and the power of the internet to bring people together from a wide range of fields and locations. The open-source online platform was created just a year and a half ago by an international team of engineers, universities and scientists striving to develop ideas and dialogue that can kick start real-world urban transformations for 2050.

“We don’t believe in a solution that fits all, but in general strategies that nonetheless need to be adapted to each place, society and culture,” explains co-founder and curator, Daniel Dendra. “Since we are a worldwide network, our strength is that we have the global discussion but also the local knowledge.”

In Berlin, FutureCityLab has created a physical hub for the first time to host workshops and other events. For those visiting during the calm between brainstorms, the hand scrawled work-in-progress of each roundtable adorns the walls. Also on display are examples of collaborative visions created on the FutureCityLab website, including a plan for urban greening in Berlin that uses vertical farming to meet the city's growing sustenance needs, and a solution to the urban heat island effect in Paris, which uses wind and solar to control the outdoor temperature.

(Image: Natalie Holmes)

So far there have been events covering topics such as peri-urbanism - which deals with growth around and between major urban areas - and the future of mobility. Dendra hopes such discussions will help the young network find its place and eventually begin to shape cities of the future. “Since we are still in a phase of self-discovery, the process is very important for the development of our goals and strategy”.

An issue at the heart of these projects is how best to incorporate input from so many sources while still keeping things clear and coherent. “We are a group of individuals but we are not based in the same studio or even city. We want to communicate in a very simple and direct way, so even if the visions that are worked out at the Lab are very complex and involve a lot of research, they can be communicated in a single view,” said Dendra.

In leading discussions about possible solutions, FutureCityLab hopes that a comprehensive roadmap to sustainability will take shape. The Berlin event is their biggest step yet towards influencing urban planning in cities across the world, but as Dendra points out, changes will have to happen soon. "If you imagine that an urban design has a lead time of around 20 years, it means that our visions for 2050 are the visions for the day after tomorrow. There is not much time left."

1 Comment

One of the biggest problems with visions of the future, is that artists do their best to make their mark in fantastical designs, which isnt too bad for isolated examples, but when trying to build a collection of structures that has to house over a million people, all their food, shopping, transport, pets, security, maintenance, lack of funds, ignorance, malic and wear and tear after teh first 6 months, often to so called more boring methods are more reliable and cheaper in teh long run. thats why skyscrapers are rectangular blocks with a steel frame core and hanging glass curtain walls, theres actually little in them.

If an architect really wanted to design a future city, tey should be loking at complete design, solar power incident, rainfall patterns now and expected, how to handle extreme events, up to a point, and how to handle the consequences when there is a hurricane, flood etc, do you really build a glass hospital on a flood plain, then complain when a tornado rips the roof off, shatters the windows, then the flood takes out not just the ground floor, generators, supplies etc, but takes out the access roads also?

The only architect Id take seriously is one who demands the use of an unused nuclear power station containment unit, for his hospital, because they are putting the protection of the patients first.

From what Ive seen about the cost of the build of a local hospital, building a containment vessel would actually be cheaper.